Quilting

It really was not intentional at all to leave my blog for a while 6 months before writing again. I know I say every time that it has been far too long but this really is quite ridiculous!

There are a few things for me to catch up with on here but we'll go for 1 at a time for now. Today's challenge for me was quilting (or at least making some progress on what I have started as my first quilted piece).

I thought I had at least let you know about when I met the lovely Hannah from her blog but maybe I didn't. We had a lovely weekend together last year during which we started to make a dress together as a bit of a sew-along. We both got as far as cutting all of our pieces out but as far as I'm aware neither of us has since got any further. We did also manage to get to a local fabric shop (the fabric guild in Leicester). As the only things that I had made previously were clothes (my apron and skirt) but Hannah's specialities lye in quilting she really inspired me to give this a go.

From the fabric guild I bought a load of packets of fat quarters that I thought would go together nicely and would work in my crafty room/study.

I decided that I would make a cover for the "seat" in the corner. this would involve quilting 2 pieces of fabric, joining these together and filling them with a foam square the correct size to fill the corner bench in he room.

I cut all of the various fabrics I into 3.5" squares so that this will make 3" squares when joined together (1/4" seam allowance for each side).

I then laid these out on our spare bed in order to establish the best possible arrangement of the colours/fabrics.

This is how it turned out. I am very happy with the arrangement and fairly sure that this is just about as random and as spread out as each of the colours can be.

Once I had done all of the arranging then comes the time to start the sewing! The exciting bit.

I started from one end of the picture above and started by sewing 2 squares together at a time.

Then cakes squares 3 and 4 from each row. I was advised that by making rows first this should then be fairly easy to join these rows and make this feel like a decent size piece (and a decent size accomplishment) later on.

I had got this far a fair while ago - all of the rows of 4 squares completed but the joining of these row felt really rather daunting. When I tried to line up the squares, as a first look there seemed to be a lot of pieces where I had been no-where near accurate enough. I was very worried that none of the squares would line up and I would end up with a very wonky looking patchwork.

Today I finally braved it. I started to join the rows after my wonderful helper (my husband) had ironed all of the seams for me. Each piece had one seam to the left and the next to the right, alternating on alternate rows so that I could make something called a "nested seam".

The first two rows went together something like this:

I was really quite shocked and very pleasantly surprised as to how well the seams seemed to be matched up. They are by no means perfect I know but for the first time that I have tried any kind of patchwork I was really quite pleased with how this had gone. I had started at the end that I thought seemed to be the most accurate in the initial stitching so was still nervous as to how the rest were going to go but pleased with the start anyway. It made stitching the rest of the rows together feel suddenly a lot less daunting anyway.

The rest also went as well/better than I had expected so I am really happy with the way that this is going. All of my rows of 4 are now together so this should now be the full left-hand side of the planning photo complete. Just a few more to go but I think that this will look fantastic once it is finished.

As much as I'm sure that sewing should be really relaxing and as much as I enjoy it while I'm doing it I also find it really rather stressful and involves an awful lot of concentrating for me at the minute given how new I am to it so I am tired out now and feeling the need to just sit down on the sofa and chill out. There might have to be a bit of crochet happening this evening as I have a couple of projects on the go that I will tell you about next time and a Sunday night film with some lovely dinner. I have to say that this has been the best and most chilled out Sunday that I have had for a long time (even if I did have to do some of my college course this morning - even that wasn't awful as I was preparing my own revision to get ahead of the game before I get too close to my exam.